


Ficmas 2019

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Secret Santa, Skiing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21959128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: A collection of five winter/holiday ficlets written in December 2019.1. Murphy/Raven and a Secret Santa gift exchange2. Miller introduces Jackson to his father3. The delinquents have a snowball fight (Murphy/Raven)4. Bellamy/Raven, and Raven's daughter spend Christmas together5. Murphy and Raven confess their feelings while trapped on a ski lift.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Raven Reyes, Eric Jackson/Nathan Miller, John Murphy/Raven Reyes
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48





	1. Murven, Secret Santa

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I wrote a few wintry ficlet requests this year as part of 12 days of ficmas (yes, I know there are not 12), and now I'm collecting them on AO3 for easier reading. I'm putting them all together because most of them are fairly short (about 1.5k each). Only the last is longer, at about 3k.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested be beesreadbooks on tumblr.

Someone in the living room, probably Clarke, has put on Christmas music. The faint strands of the opening to _All I Want for Christmas Is You_ waft into the kitchen, barely audible above the rush of water and the clink and clatter of dishes in the sink: the first sign that Thanksgiving is officially over, and the Christmas Season has begun. Raven sighs, low and under her breath, though she’s neither surprised nor annoyed. She’s had nothing but the upcoming holiday on her mind for the last hour, ever since they sent around Monty’s Santa hat and drew names for the annual gift exchange.

“Let me guess,” Bellamy says, as he passes her a handful of clean silverware to dry. “You pulled Murphy’s name.”

Raven shoots him a look, mouth contorted and eyebrow raised. “How’d you guess?”

“Because your face fell when you read the name, and he’s the most difficult person to shop for. I had him last year. He’s pretty much impossible.”

“That’s really encouraging, thanks.” She sets the forks and spoons on top of her growing pile, takes the last plate from Bellamy’s hand. He shuts off the water and grabs a spare hand towel from the countertop.

“I just mean that I get it. He doesn’t really need anything. You feel like anything you give him would just be a burden, like you’re forcing him to clutter his life up with stuff when he obviously doesn’t want it cluttered.”

“Too bad I don’t have you. I could just get you yet another Christmas ornament, since you clearly can never have enough of those.”

“Is that a hint? Do you _not_ like living in a festive winter wonderland every December?” He pretends to sound affronted, but he’s grinning as he throws the towel back on the table and starts stacking dry plates on the shelf.

“Try Halloween through New Year’s,” Raven answers. “The point is, you’re easy.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“Ha ha. You know what I mean.” She sighs again, pulls open the silverware drawer to deposit a handful of mismatched spoons, and asks, “So what did you end up getting him?”

Bellamy shrugs awkwardly, avoiding eye contact.

“Bellamy…?”

“An Amazon gift card, okay—and don’t give me that look! You only have three weeks to think of something better!”

*

On Christmas Eve, everyone gathers at Clarke’s apartment to exchange gifts. Octavia brings snowflake sugar cookies, and Clarke offers hot chocolate, spiced cider, and spiked eggnog. The gifts pile up on the table around Clarke’s mini Christmas tree. Raven can’t help but eye them with concern. Her gift to Murphy, a single green envelope with his name in all caps on the front, sticks out unobtrusively between two gift bags, each topped with fluffy multi-colored tissue paper. It looks lame, she thinks, and fights the urge to pluck it out and find some better place for it. But no matter what she does, an envelope is just an envelope. And it’s the contents of the thing that counts. Which, she supposes, is what actually worries her.

In truth, she’s the best person out of anyone in the group to find a gift for Murphy for Christmas. She knows him well, as well as almost anyone, has seen at least a little through the chinks in the walls he’s put up. Somehow, without quite meaning to, they’ve built routines around each other: lunch every Wednesday in the fall, when his classes ended early; and long text conversations once or twice a week, stupid jokes and old stories shared from the dark of her room, in the glow of blue light, from underneath the soft, thick blankets on her bed. She’s given him advice. She’s taken advice from him, too, and deemed it remarkably sound. All last summer, they played informal soccer games together on Saturday afternoons in the park, and they didn’t break the habit until the November winds blew the last leaves from the trees, and the sun started setting, annoyingly, in the middle of the afternoon. And she still remembers the day before Halloween, when they went out to a classic horror movie marathon downtown, and afterward she drove him home, parked outside his apartment and felt sorry to see him leave. And then he kissed her on the cheek to say goodbye, a strange gesture he had never made before, and she pulled him in by the front of his shirt and kissed him again on the mouth.

Bellamy turns down the music as a signal that the time to exchange gifts has begun, and Raven takes a seat at the far end of the couch. Murphy settles next to her, Miller and then Harper next to him. The couch is only meant to seat three. They end up squashed together, Raven’s arm trapped against Murphy’s and her leg against his leg.

Jasper and Monty, sitting on the floor between the couch and the table, assume the task of distributing gifts: Clarke’s present for Octavia, Bellamy’s for Harper, Miller’s for Clarke, until Monty grabs the envelope that has accidentally fallen to the floor and says, “And this is for Murphy. Is it just…?”

“Yes, it’s just the envelope,” Raven says, too fast and too short, and blames the heat of the room for the warmth spreading across her cheeks.

Murphy takes the envelope, playing up the moment with an exaggerated, curious hum. It isn’t sealed, the flap only tucked in beneath itself, but he makes a big show of opening it anyway, and pulling free the simple card inside. “A Christmas tree,” he announces, and shows it to the room. Then he flings it open, a piece of paper falling from inside and onto his lap, and reads: “Murphy, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from Raven.”

He flicks his gaze to her, and the second that their eyes meet feels like a secret passed between them, subtle and unreadable to the crowded room. The card doesn’t say _from Raven_ , she knows; it says _love Raven_. She agonized for an annoyingly long time over the word.

Murphy closes the card before anyone can see and notes, “That’s very minimalist of you, Reyes.”

She rolls her eyes. “Are you going to look at the rest of the gift or not?”

For a moment, he doesn’t seem to know what she means, before he remembers the piece of paper on his lap. He sets down the card, picks up the paper and unfolds it. Looks at it for a long time, reading it silently to himself. From the kitchen island, where Clarke has set her laptop with the sound on low, _Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree_ starts to play.

“It’s a train ticket,” Murphy announces. “To go to D.C. in April.”

An unaccountable nervousness twists in her stomach, curling itself up in corkscrews, tighter and tighter, with every passing second that she cannot read the expression on his face.

“Aren’t you going to D.C. in April?” he asks.

“Yeah. And you also have use of the second bed in my hotel room. If you want.” She’s not sure what to do, so she pats his leg and adds, “Merry Christmas, Murphy.”

But he doesn’t say anything, just raises his eyebrows, eyes wide, as he looks down at the piece of paper again.

“I think you’ve broken him,” Jasper says, and Murphy pokes his sockfoot into Jasper’s side. He still doesn’t look up.

“Um, I think this is a little over the gift exchange limit,” he notes.

“The limit is different for romantic gifts, though,” Octavia says, matter-of-fact, as she reaches for another cookie from the table. Bellamy shoots her a look but she just shrugs. “It’s true. I don’t make the rules.”

“You definitely just made up that one,” Monty says.

“Still true.”

“It’s not _romantic_ —”

“Whatever you say, Raven.”

“Hey, can someone just—” Murphy gestures, arm flailing into Miller’s personal space, toward the tree. “Just get that white envelope. It’s stuck in the tree.”

“This one?” Jasper asks, pulling it out from between the branches. Raven sees her name on it, printed neatly but off-center in black pen.

“Yeah, it’s the only one, thanks.” He plucks it out from between Jasper’s fingers and hands it to Raven, not quite meeting her eye.

The card has a picture of falling snow on the front, and inside—

“Two tickets to 2001: A Space Party at the Air and Space Museum in Washington.”

She holds them in her lap, stares at them for a long time. Everyone has gone silent again. The Christmas music sounds far away and much too loud all at once.

“I figured since you were going to be in the city—”

“There are two.” 

She looks up. He’s already staring at her, expectant, perhaps nervous; his leg is still squashed up against her leg.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs. “In case you wanted to take someone.”

She’s the one who feels broken now, capable only of holding the tickets in her hand, holding Murphy’s gaze like it’s a staring contest, feeling the smile on her face grow and grow.

Murphy isn’t smiling, and he sounds almost panicked when he asks, “So, do you like them or not?!”

She picks one up, properly grinning now, and holds it out to him. “Of course I like them, dork. Now are you going with me, or not?”

“It’s like the gift of the Magi,” Clarke says, as Murphy takes the ticket from Raven’s hand, his face screwed up in an expression somewhere between laughter and joy, and for a moment they lean in until their foreheads touch—"but the opposite.“

"If only we had some mistletoe,” Harper hums, and before either Raven or Murphy can stop her, Clarke hops up and announces:

“I think that can be arranged.”


	2. Miller/Jackson, Meeting Sergeant Miller

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested by jemleofan on tumblr, who asked for "a holiday AU where Miller's dad used to be kinda homophobic or just not accepting of his son but has come around."

The view from Miller’s bedroom window is almost exactly as he remembers it: Christmas morning, just like when he was eight, when he was twelve, when he was eighteen. Last night’s furious snow has settled, soft and clean, over the front lawn and the street, formed undisturbed drifts on top of the cars in the driveway. The sun is a bright haze in a cloudless, nearly colorless light blue morning sky, and the neighborhood is quiet: no one else awake, the slightest breeze sifting flakes of snow across uneven landscapes of snow.

Across the street, the Richardsons, or whoever lives in their house now, have cut down the towering oak that once dominated their front yard. In its place, they’ve blown up a giant, inflatable Santa, riding on a sleigh pulled by two giant, inflatable reindeer. The gaudy glow of the scene was visible last night, even in the dark and through the driving snow, coming in and out of focus as his windshield wipers swept and squeaked across his window, and everything else dissolved into a blur of dark shapes and swirling snow and streaks of faint colored lights blinking across porch railings. “Is that one your dad’s house?” Jackson asked, nudging at his arm and grinning.

Miller snorted, low and under his breath, and hunched closer over the steering wheel. Brief, half-shake of his head. And Jackson’s smile turned soft and apologetic, as he settled his hand against the back of Miller’s neck, rubbed gentle circles there with the side of his thumb.

“You still tense?”

“A bit.” He straightened his shoulders, reached out to hit the turn signal, heading left. The car bumped up over the curb, into the driveway. He remembers the wide shine of his headlights across the garage door and the flick of the front porch light on: his father coming to greet them, a hint of the warm familiarity of home.

Jackson already knew about the Sergeant, about awkward family dinners, about fights when Miller was in high school and long silences when he was in college—had known all of it for some time. Those stories Miller had never intended to tell, which came up early, in moments of unexpected intimacy. “I got in trouble a lot when I was a kid,” he’d tried to explain. “It was all dumb shit, like trespassing and petty theft—like it was too hard to be the right kind of son—” That wasn’t quite it, but Jackson didn’t mind the silence, the uncertain furrow of Miller’s brow, just sat back against his headboard and waited, and listened.

And when Miller’s father extended a Christmas invitation to them both, he encouraged Miller to accept.

“No. When he met my college boyfriend—one lunch, and it felt like it went on for ten years.”

“Yeah, but—”

They were standing on opposite sides of Jackson’s kitchen, morning silence disrupted by the intermittent splatter of snow, heavy and wet, from the tree branches outside. Jackson, leaning back against the countertop, pushed himself upright and across the room, hooked his index fingers into the pockets of Miller’s pants.

“He’s making an effort. And you’re not in college anymore.”

“The worst fight we ever had was when I told him I was gay.”

Jackson’s hands, circling his wrists, starting to trail down to his palms—

“Because you told him you were gay or—”

“Because we were already fighting and I decided it was a good time to come out.” He grabbed for Jackson’s hands, held them up between their bodies, tightly grasped in his, leaned in until their foreheads touched. “Point taken. But look—when I was in high school, he used to tell me that he went through a phase too, _when I was your age_ , and then he met my mom, and settled down—that’s the life he wanted for me. And I’m never going to have it.”

That’s what it came down to, every time, why his stomach was in knots the whole drive over, why Jackson’s answer—“But you still have a life he can be proud of”—did not quite ring true.

Behind him, Jackson turns onto his side, curls himself around Miller’s abandoned pillow; the sounds of his body, his slow and heavy movements, shifting against sheets, is equally familiar and out of place, comforting and jarring all at once, coming from the bed in his childhood room. And out in the hall, an inverse sound: the shuffling of his father’s feet in their slippers, walking past his door and to the kitchen. The hollow, wooden sounds of cupboards opening, the ceramic ring of mugs taken down from shelves. The dark and rich and cheerful smell of coffee brewing.

When he closes his eyes: every Christmas morning of his childhood; early hours; the quiet of the house and the neighborhood, only Miller and his father awake and alone before the mad arrival of family at the door; the rare unhurried morning sun and the drip of icicles from the eaves.

Last night, still standing next to Jackson in the doorway, stomping off snow, brushing off snow from their shoulders and their hair, just at the edge of the living room suffused with warm yellow light—he remembers perfectly the moment when his father pulled him into a hug. His hold had been strong and unyielding, nothing hesitant or awkward in it but only a fierce insistence, as if to bridge a long and treacherous gap between them. And then his father turned and hugged Jackson too, an easy and welcoming embrace, and a long-settled coil in Miller’s stomach began gently to unwind.

Miller closes the door softly behind him and walks in his sockfeet to the kitchen. His father is pouring fresh-brewed coffee into a chipped blue mug.

He looks up at the sound of footsteps, smiles and raises the coffee pot in greeting. His expression is tired but genuine. “Nate—Coffee?”

“Sure. Yeah.” A second mug, ancient, with the City of Arkadia seal in yellow on the side, is already sitting out. Miller leans against the counter as his father pours. “Thanks.”

A jar of sugar has been left out on the counter, even though his father has always taken his coffee black and bitter. Miller adds a half-spoonful to his cup and stirs. The clink of his spoon against the side of the mug rings with the same small, bright clarity as the rays of sun through the window or the icicles dripping into the new-fallen snow.

“Is Jackson still asleep?” Miller’s father asks, and Miller looks abruptly up.

“Yeah. He’s not really a morning person.” As soon as he says it, though, he hesitates, frowns. “Actually I don’t know if he’s a morning person or not because he works all these weird hours…” He shrugs. “I guess he’s a glad-to-get-any-sleep-he-can person.”

“Mmmm.” His father nods, looks down for a moment at the steam rising up from his mug. “He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” His gaze, distant and long, returns again from the far reaches and settles on Miller’s face. “I like him. He’s good for you—he’ll keep you grounded, like your mother did for me.”

Such a light, such a simple thing to say. But for a moment, Miller can only stand completely still, aware of the wan morning light and the stick of tile beneath his feet, the warmth of the coffee mug in his hand—but also of none of these things. The last of the coil unwinds, and dissipates. 

He does not notice that his father has turned, back toward the counter, until he hears the clink of glass against wood. A large plate of Christmas cookies, covered in cellophane, set down on the tabletop. David sits down, with his coffee, at the kitchen table, and pulls the cellophane aside. When he notices Miller watching him, he looks up, raises his eyebrows, and asks, “Do you want one?”

“Cookies for breakfast?” He pretends shock, the slightest disdain, and his father laughs.

“Vera Kane brought them over yesterday,” he says. “I promised her I would save some for you.”

“Well, good thing I’m here now,” Miller answers, and pulls out the chair across from his father. He grabs a sugar cookie snowman, and his father takes a Santa Claus. For a few minutes, before Jackson wakes, before the day truly begins, they are silent and at ease in each other’s company.


	3. Delinquent Snowball Fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested by anonymous on tumblr, who asked for "the delinquents in a snowball fight that everyone takes way too seriously[.] Would love if Raven & Murphy end up working together against others or even decided they had a personal vendetta and attack each other but then called it a draw... or maybe they kiss during the snowball fight... fjkldajkflda. If you wanted to throw some Octavia & Jasper team up in there that'd be great too!"

The first shot is fired at three minutes past ten, the morning after the first snow of the season. Jasper, excited about the snowfall, throws a snowball at Monty. He misses, and accidentally hits Miller in the arm. Miller retaliates. Jasper dodges, and Octavia, coming around the corner of the storehouse at just that moment, takes the snowball directly to the chest. Her scream of surprise alerts Bellamy, who runs from the dorms, expecting the worst. He is hit almost immediately in the arm, thigh, and shoulder by a cavalcade of flying snow. 

At six minutes past ten, he declares war.

Raven does not know anything of this history because she is spending the morning safely in her room, flipping idly through the pages of her book. She hears a few shouts coming from outside, but they ring of laughter to her ears, so she does not look up. Only when she hears the thud of footsteps running down the hall, followed by a knock on her door and Murphy’s voice calling her name, does she finally lift her head.

“Yeah?”

Murphy, slightly out of breath, has poked his head around the side of the door. He is grinning like an idiot. “Wanna form an alliance?”

Raven turns another page in her book, briefly considers. 

“Sure. An alliance to do what?”

“Win a snowball war.” He gestures behind him with his head, back down the hall. “Clarke’s outside now explaining the rules. Come on.”

Raven sighs, but swings her legs over the side of the bed anyway, searching for her boots with her toes. “What sort of snowball fight has rules?”

“The one that’s a snowball war, like I said.”

The real answer is: the one that Clarke has decided should have rules. Murphy, still catching his breath, and Raven, still pulling on her jacket, arrive to hear the last of them, Clarke standing in the middle of a restless and bloodthirsty crowd, gesturing pointedly as she speaks.

“Everyone gets twenty minutes to prepare,” she’s saying. “Then the battle begins. When you’re hit, you’re out. Last person standing wins.” She holds up her wrist, looks at her watch—around her, pairs hold hands and groups huddle, some people eyeing their opponents, others craning their necks to survey the terrain—Raven grabs Murphy’s arm, gestures with her chin toward the storehouse—

“Aaaaaand—go!”

The trick, Raven explains, as they build up a fort against the storehouse wall, will be to have a safe home base because “out there everything will be chaos.”

“And that’s different from most days how?” Murphy asks, as he packs together snowballs with his bare hands.

“Today there’s snow.”

“Good point.”

Clarke, who is not at all a neutral referee, but has instead claimed the high ground of the dropship with Bellamy, blows a high-pitched whistle with her fingers to declare that the war is on.

The safest positions, of course, are behind the makeshift snow forts that now dot the camp, but crouching behind snow walls is also not particularly fun. At least six people vault out and into the main path before the shrill sound of Clarke’s whistle has even died out, and the first casualties come nearly as fast. Murphy is a poor shot but excellent at dodging; he distracts their opponents while Raven manages to hit Monroe, Sterling, and Bree in rapid succession. 

Jasper, reckless and excited, aims for Clarke, but misses, and is almost taken out by a retaliatory shot. Octavia pushes him out of the way at the last moment, throwing a snowball as she falls for low cover on the ground and just catching Harper on the leg. They regroup at their fort against the west side of the dorms.

“Jasper’s not teaming up with Monty?” Raven asks, flattening herself against the armory wall. The snowballs are flying too fast and thick now to make it back to the fort, but she’s run out of ammo, and it’s hard to restock on the field. 

“Bad blood from the skirmish earlier,” Murphy answers. He’s crouched low on the ground, gathering up the little remaining snow in this corner to make another snowball or two. “They’ll get over it by dinner.”

“Yeah, because they’ll both just be losers by then.”

“Fuck, Reyes.” 

She glances down at him, sees that he’s paused in his work, staring up at her with notable admiration and a bit of surprise. 

“What? There can only be one left standing. And it’s not going to be either of them.” 

She grabs the snowball Murphy hands her, pinches her tongue between her teeth, and pins Monty squarely between the shoulder blades. She’s ducked out of sight again before he even sees her.

Raven grins and dusts off her hands. “Like I said.”

After the first two waves of casualties, the battle enters into a quieter, slower stage. The deceased take up seats at the edge of the clearing, transformed into mere spectators, and watch as the remaining fighters retreat to their respective encampments, warier now, all too aware of the heightened stakes. Occasional cries of encouragement and other color commentary rise up from the edges of the theater. If Raven knows her friends at all, bets are already being taken as to who will be out next, and who will be the last to survive.

Slowly, the clearing turns quiet. She can hear her own breath too loud in her ears. One hand turns an ice-cold snowball around and around, and the other holds on to Murphy’s wrist. She peeks up above the edge of the fort wall, searching out movement.

From the dropship, Clarke and Bellamy come barreling into the main road, throwing a flurry of snowballs. Their recklessness quickly leads to their downfall, but they take Miller, Jasper, and Roma out with them. Murphy distracts Octavia long enough for Raven to get her in the shoulder from behind, and then—only two are left still standing.

Murphy and Raven face each other across the decimated battlefield. They each hold a single snowball in one hand. Carefully, slowly, they walk toward each other. 

Above them, the high noonday sun shines down among the abandoned forts and snow barricades, threatening to melt them away.

“You’ll never win, Murphy,” Raven warns. “Not against me. Not with your aim.”

“I don’t need aim at this distance, Reyes. It’s over.”

“You’re right. It is over. We had a good alliance—but there can only be one survivor in the end.”

With each word, with each step, they close the last remaining distance between them. They are close enough now to touch. Murphy raises his arm—

And Raven grabs him by the front of his shirt and pulls him into a kiss. 

He immediately drops his snowball in surprise. Then he wraps both arms around her, opens his mouth to her mouth. He’s grinning into the kiss as, around them, their friends clap and cheer and laugh. Distantly, Raven can hear Sterling’s voice reaching up over the raucous noise: “Did anyone have a tie between Raven and Murphy? Anyone?”

The question makes her smile break open wider. She has one hand pressed lightly against the side of Murphy’s face, sweet little kisses between bouts of laughter, wonderfully aware of the relaxed weight of his body against hers—

And with her other hand, she lifts her last remaining snowball up and up and up—and crushes it down on top of his head.


	4. Bellamy/Raven: Spending Christmas with Kristina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested by anonymous on tumblr, who asked for a "Bellamy and Raven fic! Ravens baby daddy didn’t show up for Christmas so her boyfriend (Bellamy) steps up to the plate and tries to make the day memorable for the kid. Especially because, him and the child aren’t on the best of terms( kid feels like Bellamy is trying to take raven away from them)"

Bellamy is humming _Jingle Bells_ to himself along with the radio, almost finished with the first stack of Christmas morning pancakes, when he gets Raven’s text: a buzzing sound from somewhere off to his right. His phone is lying at the edge of the counter, just out of the danger zone. He wipes one hand awkwardly on a dish towel and pokes it awake. Then frowns.

_Change of plans. Spending the day with Kristina._

He can hear Raven’s exact tone through the text: clipped, tinged with annoyance, but not surprise, the few words she’s sent to him only the aftermath of a long argument that has drained her, left her with an aftertaste of guilt and sadness that she will not share. Finn, the flighty and irresponsible college boyfriend with whom she shares a daughter, has bailed again. Too difficult, perhaps, to devote half of the holiday to his only child. The plan has been in place since Thanksgiving: for Raven to spend the morning with Bellamy, then pick Kristina up from Finn’s place in the early afternoon.

So much for all that.

He isn’t annoyed for himself–disappointed, a little, to see the best Christmas plans he’s had in years deflate, like a balloon pricked with a pin–but for Kristina. She’s only nine, too young to have to learn distrust and wariness. 

Bellamy hesitates with his thumbs over the keyboard. His kitchen is a mess, his apartment decorated with a few haphazard strings of lights and a small tree, a gift not yet given tucked away in his closet, a Christmas postcard from his sister attached with a magnet to his fridge.

_You can still come over. I can make pancakes for three._

He watches his screen for a long time, waiting for an answer: at first nothing at all, then three dots dancing beneath his latest message, disappearing, reappearing again. He understands her hesitance. Kristina remains uncertain of him, even in the most neutral of circumstances. She doesn’t trust that he’s not out to replace her dad, or steal her mom away, and he can’t blame her: he’s the first serious relationship Raven has had since Kristina was born, an unwarranted interloper into their tight-knit and self-sufficient little family, where even her biological father is little more than a guest. Barging in on Christmas might be the worst thing he can do. 

He sets his phone down, then walks over to the sink to wash his hands. It buzzes again.

_We can be there in fifteen._

*

By the time Raven and Kristina arrive, Bellamy has made an additional two pancakes, in the shape of snowmen, and cleared off a respectable amount of space on his kitchen table. He greets Raven with a kiss on the cheek and Kristina with what he hopes is a friendly smile; she has an admirable poker face, and he can’t help feeling like his home is undergoing some sort of critical inspection as she tilts up her chin and looks around, taking it in.

“Thanks for inviting us over,” she says, though the words sound so formulaic and so dull that he’s sure her mother has spent their car ride coaching her on them. “And, ah–merry Christmas,” she adds, already following the smell of breakfast to the kitchen.

“Merry Christmas to you, too,” Bellamy calls back, and then catches Raven’s eye just in time to see her turning her gaze up to the ceiling, miming a sigh. “She doing okay?” he asks, under his breath.

Raven shrugs. “I wouldn’t call her mood festive, I’ll say that. I tried to talk to her about Finn but she wasn’t up for it.”

“Can’t really blame her.”

The clink of dishes sounds from the kitchen, and Bellamy exchanges another look with Raven, discreetly sliding his hand into hers.

“I see you found the plates,” he says, as they step through the door to find Kristina moving a snowman onto one of the round, blue-patterned plates Bellamy had placed around the table. He’s also set out syrup, powdered sugar, and blueberries. When Kristina reaches out for the berries, though, Raven stops her with a pointed clearing of her throat.

“I hope you’ve washed your hands.”

“I have!” 

An obvious lie. Raven tilts her chin down, her gaze unwavering. After a moment, Kristina hops down from her chair, sneaking around Bellamy to get to the sink.

“Do you always make pancakes in the shape of snowmen?” she asks him, over the sound of water.

“Only when I have very special guests.”

“Hmmm.” 

He’d been going for a casual tone, easy, normal, but Raven’s daughter, sharp as her mother, always seems to see right through him. She does not say anything more for several minutes, as all three settle around the table–Bellamy hands Raven the plate of pancakes, she passes him the syrup–and the radio, turned down low, starts to play _Let It Snow_. Kristina’s silence keeps him feeling uncertain, but he tells himself to bide his time. To be open. To be patient. _The best thing you can do_ , Raven had told him once, _is just to be there for her. Be around, be consistent._ And he knows from experience that this is true.

“I’m not upset about my dad,” Kristina says, all of a sudden, as she cuts into the middle of her snowman. She is eating him from the bottom up, saving his head, with its blueberry eyes, for last. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t see the quick glance the two adults exchange or the flash of sadness across her mother’s face. “I mean, that he’s not here.”

“It’s okay to be upset,” Raven answers, leaning in across the table, trying to catch her eye. “It’s okay to be upset when someone breaks a promise to you–”

“I know. But I like it when we spend Christmases together, just the two of us. What is this?”

“Powdered sugar,” Bellamy answers, tipping his plate forward so she can see the patterns of white sprinkled across his pancakes. “Looks like snow, see?”

“Just the two of us?” Raven echoes. She sounds too insistent, trying to bring the conversation back, then forces a more relaxed, lightly curious tone into her voice. “What about Bellamy? What do you think about him?”

Kristina shrugs. Bellamy’s heart has leapt up into his throat; he can feel it pounding against the soft skin there, as he watches Kristina turning the box of powdered sugar around in her hands. “He’s all right,” she says. Then she glances up at him and adds, “You make good pancakes.”

Bellamy smiles. “I’ll take that.” He slides off his chair, an impulse he cannot explain but which he supposes must come from the warm feeling starting to kindle in his chest, from the small scrap of approval like a light, beckoning, like a promise–an impulse that now is the right time. “I’ll be right back.”

Raven and Kristina barely seem to hear him: Kristina has started covering her second snowman in sugar, much to Raven’s dismay. “It’s snow, mom,” he hears her strident voice. “Snowman can’t have too much snow.”

She sounds just like Raven, but younger, smaller, and he’s glad Raven can’t see the way he’s hiding laughter behind his hand.

They’ve settled on a compromise by the time he returns, carrying an old wooden sled in his arms. “So, I was thinking,” he says, as he sits down at the table again, in the chair next to Kristina’s this time, the sled balanced on his lap, “if you wanted, for Christmas, we could go sledding.”

She looks at him critically. Takes in first the expression on his face, then the sled. Bellamy meets her with an even gaze.

“Why?”

Bellamy hesitates. “Why…do I want to go sledding?”

He senses that, just beyond his sight, Raven is biting back a smile.

“Yeah.”

“Because. My sister and I used to take this sled out all the time, and it was always a lot of fun. I found it in my mom’s house when I saw her for Thanksgiving and–” He shrugs. “I don’t know. My stepfather would take us out every winter. I always looked forward to it.”

Kristina’s eyes are still narrowed. Bellamy feels a familiar sense of exposure and slightly nauseating fear, not dissimilar to the last minute stage fright he used to get before debate team meets in high school. But worse.

“Is that a hint?” she asks, after a moment. He doesn’t immediately understand what she means. “The stepfather thing–”

“No! No, no,” he cuts in fast, Raven’s voice overlapping with his; he’d be insulted by her quick response, if he didn’t feel a similar spike of panic himself. Maybe a part of him could see this working out, long term, could dare to hope it will; maybe that part of him is not small, but steadily growing all the time. But he’s not about to drop down on one knee. “No,” he says again, “I’m not trying to take anyone’s place. Definitely not your dad.”

He pauses a moment, looking down at the way his fingers curl around the edge of the old sled. What he meant was that he understands something about fathers leaving, like his did, about the risk of loving someone new. And he knows what it feels like, too, to learn early that some risks will later not seem worth the taking–his stepfather, Octavia’s dad, left them later, too.

He doesn’t want to be like either of them.

But all he does, in this moment, is smile with genuine warmth, happy for this moment and whatever it may someday turn out to be, and shrug and answer, lightly, “Well, it’s just an idea. If you don’t want to–”

“No,” Kristina says quickly, turning back to the last bites of her sugary snowman. “I do. I want to.”

Raven reaches across the table, squeezes Bellamy’s wrist. “It’ll be fun,” she predicts.

And it is.


	5. Murphy/Raven Stuck on a Ski Lift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested by anonymous on tumblr, who asked for "Raven & Murphy as either friends/frenemies w/mutual crushes who travel with their big group on a winter ski trip, and they get stuck together on a chair lift that breaks down and confess their feelings."

The van takes a wide turn off the main road, and everyone inside, caught off balance, slides heedlessly to the left. Raven reaches out her hand to balance herself and ends up with her palm squeezing Murphy’s leg. She’s crushed up against his arm and he’s crushed up against the window, Miller briefly squashed against her other side—but even after the others have righted themselves, she doesn’t let go.

Murphy glances down at her hand, resting several inches above his knee. Then back up. “Having fun, Reyes?” he asks, level and shameless, and she pulls herself away as well as she can and crosses her arms against her chest.

“The time of my life,” she answers. She gives him a once-over, like she hasn’t been arm-to-arm and leg-to-leg with him for four long hours already, like he hasn’t been in her head for even longer, like she barely even knows who he is.

The van is an old VW Bus, cherry red and off-white, plagued by a persistent smell of weed and a storied history of break downs, almost every single one of which she has fixed herself. It seats seven—four more than her truck, and two more than Miller’s car, or Bellamy's—which is why they’ve crammed eight people into it: a great idea in theory, and when she thought she’d be safe in the driver’s seat. But Bellamy won three out of five rounds of rock/paper/scissors, so he’s behind the wheel with Clarke riding shotgun, and she’s in the back row, with her overnight bag stuffed down below her knees, watching the distant snow-covered mountains rising up and up, looming ever larger through the window out past Murphy’s head. Wondering, in her idle moments, if he’s resting the side of his foot against her foot on purpose, or because his foot has nowhere else to go.

Up ahead, at the end of the road, the ski lodge sits at the top of a low hill, surrounded by a cluster of small wooden cabins, against a backdrop of stark blue sky and jagged, white peaks.

“We’re almost there,” Bellamy tells them, as if anyone needed telling—his _dad_ voice, a little weary, strained with patience about to snap.

“Good, because I don’t think I can stand more than a few more minutes trapped in this hell van,” Miller answers, and Jasper turns around, affronted, and demands:

“Have some respect for the vehicle that brought you all the way to winter paradise.”

“Vehicle? Is that what this is?”

“Hey, I’d like to see your car make the treacherous journey that Rosie just did—”

His voice holds no more rancor than Miller’s, words tugged sideways by a smile he doesn’t bother to bite down—the trip has been long enough but Bellamy’s pulling into the parking lot now, and a certain buoyancy is rising up in all of them, long-held anticipation boiling over to excitement. Monty’s shaking his head, saying, “I can’t believe she did,” and Octavia, farthest from the only working door, already pulling herself up onto her knees as the car starts to slow, laughs and asks, “You really named your van?”

The van smells like sweat and the stuffy, thick air from the heater, feels close and crowded and too warm. When Bellamy finally cuts the engine and Jasper pulls open the door, the first hit of pure, cold, clear mountain air sends a wild thrill up Raven’s spine, makes her feel wild, makes them all _wild_.

They scramble up and over each other, rushing out of each other’s way, grabbing for jackets left crushed against the seats and then skipping out between the cars and over the pavement. Octavia whoops and sends her hat flying briefly up into the air. Bellamy grabs Clarke around the waist and spins her around, and Miller slaps the front of the old bus in appreciation, grinning wide, while Monty and Jasper high-five.

But for a moment, Raven hangs back. She pretends to take her time pulling on her coat, finding her gloves in the pockets. Hints of fresh air and the sound of revelries beckon from outside but: Murphy’s leg is still pressed against her leg, and she can see out of the corner of her eye that he is staring at her. He’s got his elbow propped up against the window and his head in his hand, a patient and appreciative and very slightly bored look on his face. They’ve been watching each other like this, across rooms, from opposite sides of diner booths and kitchen tables, during lulls in group conversations, just like this and without any hurry at all, for weeks now. Sometimes it feels like longer. She’s not sure what she’s waiting for, or what he is.

“You going to let me out, Reyes?” he asks, now.

“Thought I’d keep you trapped in here and have my way with you instead,” she answers. She’s pulling her bag up from the floor, only spares a moment’s glance his way.

Murphy holds his hand over his mouth, wide-eyed and feigning shock. "How scandalous.”

“Right. You wish.” She hauls herself to the edge of the seat, slings her bag over her shoulder, and hops out.

The sharp, thin air outside is almost enough to make her dizzy, so she breathes deep of it, fills her lungs with it. When she tilts her head all the way back, to take in the sky, all she can see is blue, and blue, and blue.

*

The ski lodge sits at the top of a hill, their cabin in the valley below, the view from its back windows nothing but uninterrupted mountain peaks. It has four bedrooms, two twin beds in each one. Clarke and Bellamy take the downstairs room, which Raven suspects is the master, and Jasper and Monty, Miller and Murphy, take the two upstairs rooms on the right. Raven and Octavia claim the bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

“I officially declare this room a girls-only space,” Octavia announces, as she shuts the door behind her with a short, decisive shove. “Clarke, you’re allowed in, of course—”

“Thanks,” Clarke answers, barely glancing up. She and Raven have unfolded a map of the resort across Raven’s bed, and Clarke is penciling in a tentative itinerary across the lined pages of a legal pad.

Raven, sitting next to her and distracted, previously, by the lure of the resort’s most famous and most challenging trail, looks up and fixes Octavia with a narrow and tentatively suspicious gaze.

“But no one else,” Octavia finishes. “Clubhouse rules. No boys allowed.”

“Do you think a lot of boys are going to try to invade the south side of the cabin?” Raven asks, slow and wary. Her finger is still resting on the map, directly at the top of Devil’s Run.

“I think one might,” Octavia answers, as she climbs up over the footrest and settles, cross-legged, at the end of the bed.

Clarke carefully pulls the corner of the map out from under her ankle but doesn’t otherwise look up. Raven crosses her arms. Her expression is fully accusatory now, but Octavia looks back at her with utmost innocence.

“I’m just saying,” she continues, after a long beat, “that I didn’t come all the way out here just to be sexiled from my own room. You can kick Miller out of his. Let him sleep on the floor of Jasper and Monty’s.”

Raven still doesn’t answer. Clarke’s pencil scratches across the page, and from downstairs, slight hints of laughter and conversation, the sound of something heavy dropping on the floor, waft up through the closed bedroom door.

Octavia crosses her arms, too, and spells it out: “If I hear Murphy tapping on our door at one in the morning, I’m shooing him away. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Murphy and I aren’t hooking up.”

“Yet.”

Clarke sighs—reminding herself not to get involved, Raven thinks, and nudges Clarke’s thigh with her knee—but Raven doesn’t say a word, and after a moment, Octavia breaks. She lets her hands fall into her lap and rolls her eyes, tries for a smile. “He is into you, you know. It’s pretty obvious.”

“That goes both ways,” Clarke answers, her voice annoyingly light, as she draws a star next to ‘dinner out—lodge restaurant—7pm.’ “I mean, the obviousness.”

Raven looks from one to the other, feels herself under siege from all sides, wonders what she can say that both saves face and isn’t an obvious lie. They’ve never discussed the Murphy Situation before. She’d been letting herself believe that the full import of the flirting, the long looks, the unnecessary touches—the one weird time he let his head rest in her lap while they were hanging out at the Blakes—that all of this was lost on everyone but the two of them.

Yet she’s never doubted in her own mind that if she made a move, a real move, he would meet her halfway, crossing at the same time the narrow space they keep between them.

And that she has no plans to come knocking at his door in the darkest and deepest hour of the night, another unspoken truth, hits her only now as something strange.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she says now. Despite her strident tone, or because of it, the sentiment comes out hollow and undoubtedly weak.

*

The next morning, Bellamy and Octavia make everyone pancakes for breakfast, and then, fueled by Clarke and Raven’s impatience, the group heads out to the slopes.

Raven, the only one to bring her own skis, waits for the others on the back porch of the lodge, watching the sun glint off the hard-packed snow, the steady rise of the ski lift in the distance, the silhouettes of people zig-zagging down the mountainside. The resort feels alive with activity, and the crackle of excitement she feels, to finally get out there, to conquer the mountain as she has always wanted to do, calms and soothes her in a bizarre but pleasant way. She’s ready. She’ll be out there, climbing up and up against the crystalline blue of the sky and into the sharp, clear cold of the air, soon, so soon—

As soon as these slowpokes behind her hurry up.

The lodge door opens and Jasper, carrying his snowboard awkwardly while he tries to zip his jacket up, steps over the threshold. Right behind him, unexpectedly, is Murphy. He rests his skis against the wall as he fixes his lift ticket to his coat.

“I didn’t know you can to ski,” Jasper says, as Raven turns around, leaning back against the porch railing and watching them with interest.

“That’s because I am a man of mystery,” Murphy replies, deadpan, and Jasper shrugs.

Raven raises her eyebrows. “Oh, clearly. Is everyone else almost ready?”

“I think so,” Jasper answers. He pulls his goggles down over his eyes, tilts his head back to look up at the highest peaks. “Clarke is still trying to convince Bellamy to actually try skiing—but other than that, yeah.” Just as he finishes speaking, the door opens again, and the rest of the group—Bellamy and Clarke at the back of the small crowd, still arguing—push their way past each other and onto the porch.

Raven almost loses sight of Murphy in the mess of people fighting with their lift tickets, searching for gloves, pulling hats out of their jacket pockets, knocking over each other’s skis—but somehow they end up next to each other on the porch steps, putting on their skis side by side.

“Are you skiing Devil’s Run?” he asks, and Raven pauses abruptly, halfway through the process of attaching her right ski. She glances over at him. He is not looking at her, his brow furrowed as he focuses on his boots.

“Yeah.” She sits up straight again, sticks her hands in her pockets to grab her gloves. “What about you? What’s your plan?”

“Same thing.” He sits up too, turns toward her and then lets his gaze drift to the mountain, tall and imposing above the lodge and the collection of cabins down below. “We could head up together.”

“Sure.” She stands up, holds out her hand for him: half an offer of assistance, half the handshake that seals a deal. “Lift buddies?”

The corner of Murphy’s mouth curls up, and he clasps his hand tightly in hers. “How could I say no to a romantic proposal like that?”

*

The chair lift wobbles slightly beneath them as they lose contact with the ground, the snow falling away beneath their skis. Raven pulls the safety bar down in front of them, and then leans back, taking in the crystalline clarity of the sun pricking against the snow, the breathless undisturbed stretch of the sky. The higher they rise, the more she feels like she is flying, and the true exhilaration of flight fills her to her overflowing.

“Feels amazing up here doesn’t it—Murphy?”

Her smile falters when she glances to her left, at Murphy, who is sitting completely still and stiff, his gloved hands gripping the edge of the chair.

“You all right?” Raven asks.

He grunts briefly in reply.

Raven hesitates, tilting her head and considering the question several times before she asks, “Are you afraid of heights?”

“No,” he snaps, turns to look at her too quickly and then, though the lift stays steady, reaches out with one hand to grab the safety bar. Raven bites back a smile. He’s not watching her, though, the opaque gaze of his ski goggles trained straight out ahead. "No,” he says again. “I’m fine with heights. I just don’t like how—open the lift is.”

“Okay.”

She tries to keep her voice steady. But she’s never seen Murphy so on edge before, and the sight falls somewhere between hilarious and cute.

“You seriously aren’t bothered by the way your legs just—woah, what’s that?”

His knuckles, Raven imagines, must be nearly colorless within his gloves, he’s got such a death grip on the bar and the side of the lift. It swings gently, briefly in place, and then is still. Raven looks down at the ground, then back up over her shoulder, toward the top of the trail. The whole lift has stopped, trapping them just three chairs short of the start of Devil’s Run.

“I think we’ve stopped,” she says.

“Really putting that genius brain of yours to good use, aren’t you?”

Usually, she would retaliate for that remark, but she lets this one go. Murphy is passing his hand over his face, knocking his goggles briefly off-kilter, and he seems to be regaining himself only with difficulty. She waits out the moment with him but doesn’t speak. Instead, she watches him carefully as he takes a few breaths, steadies himself, sits back against the chair with only some unease.

“They’ll probably get it running again soon,” Raven says, after a few moments, and Murphy lets out a shaky huff of breath.

“Or we’ll be stuck here all night, either one.”

“Mmmm.”

She settles next to him, her hands in her lap. Looks down at her feet. Her skis stick out oddly in front of her, seeming to soar through the air.

Then, abruptly: “Murphy, I have a confession to make.”

He glances at her briefly, perhaps warily. “What sort of confession?”

“Just that… I really didn’t think you were a good enough skier to take on Devil’s Run.”

For a second, pure silence between them, the sounds of the resort below distant and alien, like hints of life from another world.

Then Murphy laughs, a short bark, and answers, “Oh, yeah, I’m a winter sports enthusiast. Skiing, snowboarding, ice skating.”

“Ice skating?”

“I played hockey in high school.”

Raven can’t keep the grin from her face any more than she can explain the delighted, joyful feeling she gets when she pictures Murphy on skates, gliding backwards across the ice. “We should go skating sometime then,” she says, and he grunts briefly in reply, and glances down over the edge of the lift.

“Sure, Reyes, if we get down from this death trap alive. It’s a date.”

He reaches out to pat her arm, no more than a friendly and fleeting gesture, but she traps his hand beneath her hand instead. She can barely feel the outline of his fingers beneath the thick fabric of his gloves. But his arm is pressed up against her arm, his leg against her leg, and when they exchange smiles, his expression is surprisingly soft. As she knows hers is.

She almost wouldn’t mind if they _were_ stuck on this stupid lift all day.

“So…” He shoves his goggles up onto the top of his head, raises his eyebrows, and the gentle tilt of his smile becomes arch. “You want to make out?”

“Ah, I should push you off this thing!”

She covers her face with her hands, mostly to hide that she’s grinning. Next to her, Murphy is laughing, telling her she shouldn’t joke about shit like that, and she feels herself on the verge of laughing too, perhaps so hard that she will lose her breath. Everything, the ski lift, the shine of the sun and the chill of the air, the mountains and the cabin and the glittering snow, and everything that has ever been between them, seems suddenly so easy and so silly and so simple all at once.

“I can’t believe I like you,” she manages, barely, as she pulls her goggles off and wipes at her eyes.

“Oh, hold on, you like me?” He rests his elbow on the back of the chair—tentatively—and fixes her with a steady gaze and sly grin. His voice is very nearly deadpan. “Like— _like_ _me_ like me? Like if this were high school, you’d send me a note with a little check box on the bottom and—”

“Oh, shut it.” She’s rolling her eyes toward the heavens but still laughing, faintly, reaches out with her hand in the vague direction of his mouth, misses and ends up pressing her palm against the side of his cheek. She can feel him kiss, lightly, briefly, the heel of her hand. She drops her hand down to her lap again and half-turns toward him, the last of her giggles dying out, and just watches him.

“I really am fond of you.”

The words sound like a revelation, gentle and good, even to herself.

He quirks the corner of his mouth up. “I’m pretty fond of you, too, Reyes.”

She reaches out, tugs the side of his hat safely down over his ears. Traces a line down his nose. Leads him in closer to her, the tip of her finger beneath his chin.

She means to kiss him only briefly, but the kiss is not brief; it is breathless; and they do not break apart until the lift stutters to life again and carries them up and away.


End file.
